Baseball Fury

I’m guessing that some of you baseball fans who subscribe to Service Electric were wondering why you couldn’t get the early innings of the Yankees-Red Sox opening night Sunday on ESPN2 and never got it on ESPN2 HD.

Actually, I’m guessing some of you used rude language and threw things at your TV, especially if you're fans of the teams.

Well, I have the answer for you.

Service Electric Vice President Joseph Macus told me that what happened Sunday night was the result of some kind of clerical error at ESPN, and that the Lehigh Valley was far from alone in suffering. "It wasn't our fault," he said.

Let’s begin by explaining that in addition to its customers in eastern Pennsylvania, SECTV serves parts of western New Jersey. Those New Jersey counties are part of what is known as the New York City Designated Market Area, or DMA. The Lehigh Valley is part of the Philadelphia DMA.

If the Yanks-Red Sox had been the usual Sunday night game on ESPN, there wouldn’t have been a problem. Those games are broadcast exclusively on ESPN, and the regional sports networks, including Philadelphia’s Comcast and New York’s YES Network, are shut down.

However, because the NCAA Women’s Final Four was on ESPN, this particular Sunday night ballgame was shifted to ESPN2, where there is no exclusivity. Under Major League Baseball policy, since New York’s YES Network broadcast the game, the ESPN2 feed was blacked out for the New York DMA, including New Jersey. YES has exclusive rights there.

With me so far?

SECTV has equipment that allows eastern Pennsylvania customers to receive signals that are blacked out for those western New Jersey customers. But Macus said there was a screwup in ESPN’s control center that determines which areas are to be blacked out, affecting not just our area but also parts of Connecticut and New York. All of them were blocked.

As a result, all hell broke loose. Macus said a bunch of Service Electric’s eastern Pennsylvania customers called in to complain, and the same thing was happening elsewhere in the Northeast. “It was a mess,” he said.

The HD feed to Service Electric never did get straightened out. I know, because I kept flicking back, pretty much to the end of the game, and getting a black screen.

But the regular feed on ESPN2 finally came through around the second or third innings, Macus said, although some audio problems persisted for a while. I had given up and started watching something else by then, but I returned and picked the game up around the sixth and watched to the end. By then, it was fine.

If you’re wondering whether this happened at SECTV rival RCN, it didn’t. Macus said that because RCN doesn’t have any New Jersey Zip codes in its service area, it didn’t have to worry about a split feed from the network.

“Believe me,” he said, “the last thing we wanted to do was have something like this happen. We know how popular baseball is, and especially where the Yankees are involved.”

By the way, the teams are scheduled to play again on ESPN2 Wednesday night. Macus told me, “We’ve been assured we will get the game here in Pennsylvania on Wednesday.”

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The sound was terrible and at times there was no sound at all! At one point we had to turn on the closed caption so we would be able to "hear" the announcer. The station cut away to commercial in the middle of a conversation - it was awful. So we turned on Andy Reid's press conference- for some laughs/tears!